With the average brain containing approximately 86 billion neurons, all capable of forming an infinite number of connections with each other, we knew that there was some serious computational power sitting inside our skulls. In fact, the human brain is the most complex system ever discovered in the known Universe. The only thing that comes close to its complexity is perhaps the Universe itself. Which is fitting because new neuroscience research suggests that the two have a lot in common.
There is obviously a lot about the Universe that we don’t know. Dark Matter, Dark Energy, and the nature of gravity for starters. But that hasn’t stopped some enterprising individuals to try and come up with the elusive Theory of Everything that could combine Einstein’s Theory of Relativity with Quantum Mechanics. One of the leading contenders for a TOE is M-Theory.
As Quanta Magazine explains:
“String theory (or, more technically, M-theory) is often described as the leading candidate for the theory of everything in our universe. But there’s no empirical evidence for it, or for any alternative ideas about how gravity might unify with the rest of the fundamental forces. Why, then, is string/M-theory given the edge over the others?
The theory famously posits that gravitons, as well as electrons, photons and everything else, are not point-particles but rather imperceptibly tiny ribbons of energy, or ‘strings,’ that vibrate in different ways. Interest in string theory soared in the mid-1980s, when physicists realized that it gave mathematically consistent descriptions of quantized gravity. But the five known versions of string theory were all ‘perturbative,’ meaning they broke down in some regimes. Theorists could calculate what happens when two graviton strings collide at high energies, but not when there’s a confluence of gravitons extreme enough to form a black hole.
Then, in 1995, the physicist Edward Witten discovered the mother of all string theories. He found various indications that the perturbative string theories fit together into a coherent nonperturbative theory, which he dubbed M-theory. M-theory looks like each of the string theories in different physical contexts but does not itself have limits on its regime of validity — a major requirement for the theory of everything. Or so Witten’s calculations suggested.”
Puny humans like you and me can only perceive “reality” in three dimensions, but one of the main components of M-Theory is the suggestion that these strings actually fit within 11 dimensions. If that’s true then that means that there are quantum phenomenon that we can’t perceive in the same way that we’re incapable of seeing infrared light. Now here’s why that’s important. Not only is space-time ultimately made up of 11 dimensions but the inner workings of the human brain also allegedly operate according to that same structure. At least that’s the case according to the latest neuroscience research that suggests that the human brain is also capable of processing information in up to 11 dimensions.
According to Futurism, “This latest brain model was produced by a team of researchers from the Blue Brain Project, a Swiss research initiative devoted to building a supercomputer-powered reconstruction of the human brain.
The team used algebraic topology, a branch of mathematics used to describe the properties of objects and spaces regardless of how they change shape. They found that groups of neurons connect into ‘cliques’, and that the number of neurons in a clique would lead to its size as a high-dimensional geometric object.
‘We found a world that we had never imagined,’ says lead researcher, neuroscientist Henry Markramfrom the EPFL institute in Switzerland. “There are tens of millions of these objects even in a small speck of the brain, up through seven dimensions. In some networks, we even found structures with up to 11 dimensions.”
Surely this can’t be a coincidence can it? Two complex structures, the brain and the Universe, both susceptible to quantum fluctuations, those in the brain that lead to consciousness and those in space-time that lead to the nature of reality itself, both capable of operating in up to 11 dimensions. Wouldn’t this suggest that M-Theory is no longer just a theory but rather an accurate description of reality? And taken further, wouldn’t this also seem to suggest that perhaps the entire Universe is capable of achieving consciousness as well?!?
Is it merely coincidence that the brain and the Universe operate within 11 dimensions?!
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